Making Content Searchable by Google of Android App

Mobile apps have been gaining in popularity with the passage of time. Users, therefore, want to not just look at websites but also mobile apps when they search for a solution on Google. There is a way in which we can enable Google to see through our Android app’s content in order to present our Android application as a destination to users via Google search results.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The first step is to provide intent filters for the activities so that Google can open and crawl specific content on the application. Google Search’sAndroid app indexing, on the other hand, complements this capability. This is done by presenting links to relevant app content along with presenting links to the web pages in users’ search results. This means that mobile users can click on the relevant link which will open the mobile app from the users’ search results. This allows them to have a glance at the Android application’s content.

To be able to enable Google Search’s Android application indexing capability, we have to develop and present a relation between our application and the website to Google. The following steps can help in the endeavour.

By adding intent filters in the application’s manifest, we have to enable deep linking to some specific content in the application.

The next step is to append these links with notes in the associated webpage on the app’s website.

Finally, you need to opt in to allow Googlebot to view through the APK in Google Play Store. This helps it to index the application’s content.

PS: Googlebot is nothing but Google’s web crawling bot. It is also known as “spider” to some people in the industry. The process involves Googlebot crawling to identify new as well as updated web pages in order to add them to Google Index.

This article shall provide more information about enablingdeep linking and indexing of the mobile app’s content. This will eventually allow users to directly open the app’s content from mobile search results.

Enabling Deep Links for App Content

To perform this task, we need to be able to add intent features for the relevant activities in the app’s manifest. It is these intent filters that take the responsibility to allow deep linking to the content in any of the activities.

How to add Intent Filters for Deep Links

Intent filters that encompass some of the following attribute values & elements in the manifest.

<action>

Need specification about the ACTION_VIEW intent action in order to allow the intent filter to be able to reach from Google Search.

<data>

One or even more <data> tags can be added, depending on the requirement. Each tag that is added has to represent a URI for resolution of the activity. The <data> tag has to at least encompass the android:scheme attribute.